Pamela Clarke Keogh

“Fool For Love,” excerpted from the book

Some men love women. They feel comfortable in their presence, preferring them, almost, to their own sex. (Once, asked what sort of girls he liked, Elvis said, “Female mostly.”) Like puppies, women sense this—they sense who can and cannot be trusted and are instinctively drawn to them.

Some of these Men Who Love Women grow up to be president (liberal Democrats, generally). Some grow up to be hairdressers. Some grow up to be movie stars playing hairdressers who dabble in democratic politics (Warren Beatty). But because of the wide swath of his affections—not to mention the millions of women who fantasize about him even today—Elvis is in a class by himself.

With E, there were famous women, Hollywood starlets, hometown girls, women who claimed, posthumously, to bed him, unknown women, and women whose names he could not remember, or perhaps never knew. Presley was a Method Lover. In the same way that he threw himself into singing “Hound Dog” or acting in Harum Scarum (playing a matinee idol on Cecil B. DeMille’s leftover sets from King of Kings), Elvis believed. In the moment, it cannot be doubted that he loved every woman he was with. Even the slightest student of Presleyana soon learns that the King did not sleep alone and “Mornin’, baby” can cover a lot of bases.

For Elvis, every day was Valentine’s Day. He was the Love Potentate and as such, it was fundamentally impossible for him to be monogamous. It’s not that he was chronically unfaithful, it is just unfathomable that this might be in the realm of possibility for him. Like Jesus, like Buddha, like George Clooney, E was love. And yet conversely, Elvis was a product of his era in that no matter how many women he slept with, he definitely subscribed to the good girl/bad girl theory, except for Ann-Margret—who rode motorcycles, loved her parents, and looked great in skintight pants. She was both Good Girl and Bad Girl.

From a technical standpoint, Elvis was a great kisser, that first “should we or shouldn’t we” hurdle, and loved holding hands in the dark. He had the confidence of a much loved son; the eternal circle: One loves and is loved in return.

It is said that you can tell what a man is like in bed by watching him walk across a room. Elvis could dance, certainly. With Elvis, there was no mugging twist. No chasing the backbeat. No embarrassing Earth, Wind & Fire (“Okay, people, put your hands together for ‘September’”). Here we are at the Greenwich Country Club—get down! white guy air guitar for him.

But putting aside his physical presence, Elvis wooed women with a dizzying combination of charm, truculence, Southern good manners, underlying sexual tension, and just enough little boy neediness to keep one interested. Whatever it was, it worked. “He always had a playmate,” observed Alfred Wertheimer.

Elvis was a definite closer, romance-wise. Women—teenagers, grandmothers, eight-year-olds—loved him.

But what was it like to date Elvis? Like Mick Jagger, he had the world’s dark magic, and this was a big part of his appeal. “Man is limited only by the bounds of his imagination,” said Franklin Roosevelt (granted, about the Depression), but it could apply to Elvis, too. A rock-and-roll star since the age of twenty, E was never in need of a Mrs. Robinson to teach him a thing. In the early days of touring, the boys had to drag Elvis out of bed to get to the next gig. He was, naturellement, not alone. “He looked like he’d been beaten up with a blender,” recalled Scotty.

A date with Elvis could mean anything. Well, it wouldn’t mean a weekend in Paris, since he never returned to Europe after the army, but in later years you could get on the Lisa Marie and fly to Vegas for an overnight. Or just lounge around in matching PJs all day, reading Kahlil Gibran and checking out the security cameras positioned throughout Graceland, then picking up the dinner tray left outside the bedroom door.

Like most men, we see Elvis had his good and his bad points. He knew how to kiss. He looked better than Jim Morrison in black leather pants. His profile reminded some of John Barrymore—or Michelangelo’s David. On the other hand, he never helped with the carpool, fetched a cup of coffee, or knew how to unload a dishwasher. Still, “Whoever he was with at the time,” a friend recalls, “he loved.”